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[miauw62]

You can just wire the singulo directly in the grid for a few reasons. Mainly so nobody will dare mess with the doors

But seriously, tough, if you wire the solars directly in the grid too I *think* you can charge the solar SMESs at the same time as the singulo SMESs, so there's plenty of IC reasons to do it at round start.

[10ebbor10]

Also, it makes the system much more failsafe. After all, otherwise there's only a single cable from the singulo to the rest of the station.

Secondly, in the event of a collector failure, it allows the solars to power the emitors.

[Damiac]

Well, my real OOC reason is if everyone just wires the singurity into the grid and blows up the power sink, power sinks are useless. 
I'm pretty sure the solar smes's are already connected to the emitters... somehow.  I've turned off the engineering SMES outputs before, and had the emitters continue to fire.

But like I said, nobody can do much when there's a power sink.  Do they die on their own after some amount of time? I used one as a traitor once, it lasted a very long time, which I took advantage of by crowbarring my way into the armory and captain's office.  Eventually it seemed to blow up somehow.

On an unrelated topic, Rev rounds:

The trend of rev rounds having evil heads of staff presents one big issue.  The heads then break space law, and in the process, make it way too hard to be a rev.  If they say anyone outside their work zones will be arrested, it's impossible to organize a revolution.  Since they're usually admin events, everyone knows its rev from the start.  Security, and the armory, are under tight watch, making it impossible to get weapons.  So it seems to end up with an unarmed and unorganized revolution vs all the heads, security, ai, and borgs.  On top of that, any remotely suspicious behavior is punished by torture and death. 

[miauw62]

If I ever was captain in a rev round, I would make joints mandatory for all crew-members. So they can party with me all night and then space me when I'm drunk and drugged up

[Hanslanda]

What is the proper way to handle a power sink?

It's blatantly obvious when one's in use, but of course, IC wise, I should look to the obvious failure points of the system first.

This is the typical timeline surrounding a power sink:
1. Power starts dropping out around the station. Everyone starts yelling IC (and often OOC) about how the engineers are obviously incompetant, and all demand to be let in to engineering to 'properly' set up the singulo.
2. I run over to the singulo cam, to verify everything's ok. Then I check the SMES's.  Which are both fine, obviously. I relay this to the crew.
3. CALL THE SHUTTLE!!!
4. I recommend we investigate the problem before we abandon station. After some checks of a few APCs, it becomes apparent that the power grid doesn't have enough power.
5. Announce to the crew there is a mysterious power drain.  Let them know i'm working on it.
6. The station is in dark chaos. All doors can be crowbarred, almost nobody can do their jobs.  I'm running around checking the wiring, looking for the power sink.
7. The power comes back on somehow.

So my question is, what's the right way to deal with this?  There's a lot of possible places for the sink to be, and the only way I've found that even approaches being able to narrow down where it might be is to just cut cables out from engineering, hoping to find the area with the sink.  Every time i've tried this it ends up gone before I even find it.

If you could check current flowing through wires, it'd be easier, but all you can check is the power in the system, which is just the total output of the SMES's. 

I've heard if you connect the radiation collectors directly to the power grid, you'll blow up the sink, but I can't think of a reasonable IC justification for that, since my character shouldn't know about power sinks, in my mind.  I always play it IC as assuming there is a short or something somewhere, and putting more power to a short is likely to cause a fire, not fix it.

In Engineering, next to Secure Storage, right 'above' the hardsuits is a Power Monitoring Computer. It tells you how much power various parts of the station are using. It is useful for tracking down shunted APC-AI's (They draw 1mw of power, btw.) and for finding powersinks, because you just look and see what conflux of areas is drawing all the power, and go there.

Computers. They're freaking magic.

As for Rev rounds... There's a LOT of non-heads/security on station usually, and there are a SHITPILE of weapons available to anyone. Literally all the things can be weapons in the right hands. Also, disarm intent. And the QM can get weapons is the bartender brings him the shotgun or the QM steals the Illicit Wing shotgun.

[Glloyd]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

My satellite solar array, with viewing station to the north.

As the almost 13 hour round draws to a close, I took a picture of one of my additions to the abandoned satellite. I rebuilt the whole thing, added new rooms, put in a ton of computers, and started setting up a singularity to the south. Pretty good stuff.

[Damiac]

Hmm, are you sure you can find the power sinks using the power computer?  I thought it just showed all apcs as having 0% battery.  The power sink draws more power from the APCs near it?

In the last rev round, it was what, 7 revs vs the heads and security? It seems like the first rev heads need to be good at recruiting, quickly. But since you have to RP it, the first people you try to convert can just go to the heads, then you're on lockdown.

How many players does it take for a legit rev round? I'd be interested to see how it works out in a secret game mode, so people don't know there's a revolution until they make a move.  I'd like to play it with LOLflashing allowed too, just to see how it works out.

FAKEEDIT: glloyd... what's up with the knots everywhere? I mean, even in the non-intersections... if I were your CE, you'd get a stern talking to, I tell you what

[Glloyd]

Hmm, are you sure you can find the power sinks using the power computer?  I thought it just showed all apcs as having 0% battery.  The power sink draws more power from the APCs near it?

In the last rev round, it was what, 7 revs vs the heads and security? It seems like the first rev heads need to be good at recruiting, quickly. But since you have to RP it, the first people you try to convert can just go to the heads, then you're on lockdown.

How many players does it take for a legit rev round? I'd be interested to see how it works out in a secret game mode, so people don't know there's a revolution until they make a move.  I'd like to play it with LOLflashing allowed too, just to see how it works out.

FAKEEDIT: glloyd... what's up with the knots everywhere? I mean, even in the non-intersections... if I were your CE, you'd get a stern talking to, I tell you what

Meh. I was tired when I did it, and running out of cable.

[BigD145]

How to get going on the derelict teleporter before the world resets.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Solars aren't that hard to do. Inside the teleporter room you could fit R&D stuff and research up to whatever you wanted. Roughly 1.5 canisters of air + a heater will make the room liveable without internals. The iron doors should be proper airlocks of course. I think even 2-3 solars at each corner will give you enough power forever.

[Nick K]

The trend of rev rounds having evil heads of staff presents one big issue.  The heads then break space law, and in the process, make it way too hard to be a rev.  If they say anyone outside their work zones will be arrested, it's impossible to organize a revolution.  Since they're usually admin events, everyone knows its rev from the start.  Security, and the armory, are under tight watch, making it impossible to get weapons.  So it seems to end up with an unarmed and unorganized revolution vs all the heads, security, ai, and borgs.  On top of that, any remotely suspicious behavior is punished by torture and death.

Having had a painful experience as a rev head the other day, I see where you're coming from to some extent. On the other hand, the requirement to RP conversion before flashing means that having evil heads gives a big advantage in recruitment. Certainly my big problem was that I lacked experience in the role and so my rev group was disorganised and ineffective.

Hanslanda - getting weight of numbers as a rev is not trivial, and organising them is very hard when you consider both radio and PDA messages can be intercepted. When I was playing there were perhaps 25 players, of whom 10 or so were security/heads. That means the 3 rev heads needed to convert an awful lot of crew to even get parity... and that's before taking into account that the security players are often the ones who are more experienced and better at fighting. I also found quite a few crew were reluctant or outright unwilling to convert through RP, which is fine of course, but I took it to mean they OOC didn't want to be an antag so I didn't push the issue.

Wiring the singularity into the grid apparently makes door shocks fatal which is potentially very nasty given that many players don't have insulated gloves. There are certainly IC justifications for doing it, but this could very easily end up with quite the death toll

[Spaghetti7]

PDA messages can be intercepted

What. No one told me this.
Noted.

[BigD145]

PDA messages can be intercepted

What. No one told me this.
Noted.

They're recorded on a server in the comms room. I assume the AI can look at all this and report to the Heads. Of course this also means you can seed disinformation.

[Scelly9]

The best thing to do as rev is get everyone a station-bounced radio and have a channel for chatter.

[Jacob/Lee]

On power sinks: They drain massive amounts of power, then explode with a force stronger than the syndie bomb when they overload. Learned that yesterday. I planted it four tiles from the security (maintenance) door and it killed power EVERYWHERE. It did that before exploding and blowing the whole east wall of the security office down.

Also: The AI sometimes intercepts PDA messages. One computer in comms logs all of them, too.

[Damiac]

A revolution lives or dies by the supply department.  If you can get revs into supply, you only need one weapon to get your crates.  Of course, one of the first things that happens in a rev round is all the heads get full access, and they like to snoop around supply for that very reason.

My point is, although the evil heads routine provides good RP reasons for a revolution, it's also the best meta-strategy to win a rev round for the heads.